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ABSTRACT
Data on Central and Eastern European anti-Communist revolutions are plagued by missing values, and a disproportional amount of scholarly attention has been given to nonviolent strategies adopted by revolutionaries during the collapse of Communism when compared to the behavior of state security and armed forces. This study turns attention to the latter through providing among the first comprehensive explanations of varying types of defection that arose during the Warsaw Pact state revolutions. It discovers that four states experienced varied forms of defection. Before concessions were granted to the opposition, Czechoslovakia experienced commander plus subordinate resistance, while Romania experienced subordinate resistance. In contrast, after regimes made concessions, Bulgaria experienced both commander and subordinate resistance as did East Germany. These results offer new implications for our understanding of civil–military relations during mass dissent.
Notes
1. Risa Brooks, “Integrating the civil–military relations subfield,” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 379–98.
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3. Risa Brooks, Military Defection and the Arab Spring (Oxford Research Encyclopedia, February 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.26.
4. Holger Albrecht and Dorothy Ohl. “Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior during Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (March 2016): 38–52.
5. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011); Sharon Erickson Nepstad, “Mutiny and Nonviolence in the Arab Spring Exploring Military Defections and Loyalty in Egypt, Bahrain, and Syria,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 3 (May 1, 2013): 337–49.
6. David Pion-Berlin, Diego Esparza, and Kevin Grisham. “Staying Quartered: Civilian Uprisings and Military Disobedience in the Twenty-First Century,” Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 230–59.
7. Aurel Croissant, David Kuehn, and Tanja Eschenauer, “Mass Protests and the Military.” Journal of Democracy, Volume 29, no. 3, (2018): 141–55.
8. Gene Sharp. The Politics of Nonviolent Direct Action, vol. 3 (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).
9. Ibid, Chenoweth and Stephan, 22.
10. Alexei Anisin, “Social Causation and Protest Mobilization: Why Temporality and Interaction Matter,” Territory, Politics, Governance 6, no. 3 (2018): 279–301.
11. Jonathan Sutton, Charles Butcher, and Isak Svensson,“Explaining Political Jiu-Jitsu Institution-Building and the Outcomes of Regime Violence against Unarmed Protests.” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 5 (2014): 559–73.
12. Derek Lutterbeck, “Arab Uprisings, Armed Forces, and Civil–Military Relations,” Armed Forces & Society 39, no. 1 (2013): 28–52.
13. Marcos Degaut, “Out of the Barracks: The Role of the Military in Democratic Revolutions,” Armed Forces & Society, June 22, 2017, 0095327 × 17708194.
14. Philip Lutscher, “The More Fragmented the Better? – The Impact of Armed Forces Structure on Defection during Nonviolent Popular Uprisings,” International Interactions 42, no. 2 (2016): 350–75.
15. Zoltan Barany, How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Julien Morency-Laflamme and Theodore McLauchlin, “The Efficacy of Ethnic Stacking: Military Defection during Uprisings in Africa,” Journal of Global Security Studies. Forthcoming.
16. Terrence Lee, “Military Cohesion and Regime Maintenance: Explaining the Role of the Military in 1989 China and 1998 Indonesia,” Armed Forces and Society 32, no. 1 (2005): 80–104.
17. Urlich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, “Coup-Proofing and Military Effectiveness in Interstate Wars, 1967–99,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, no. 4 (2011): 331–50.
18. Michael Makara, “Coup-Proofing, Military Defection, and the Arab Spring,” Democracy and Security 9, no. 4 (2013): 334–59.
19. Theodore McLauchlin, “Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion.” Comparative Politics 42, no. 3 (2010): 333–50.
20. Julien Morency-Laflamme, “A Question of Trust: Military Defection During Regime Crises in Benin and Togo,” Democratization (2017), https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2017.1375474.
21. Ibid, McLauchlin, 2010.
22. Erica Chenoweth and Orion Lewis, “Unpacking Nonviolent Campaigns Introducing the NAVCO 2.0 Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 3 (2013): 415–23.
23. Michael Urban, Vladimir Igrunov, and Sergei Mitrokhin, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
24. Minton Goldman, Revolution and Change in Central and Eastern Europe: Political, Economic, and Social Challenges (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1996), 39.
25. Zoltan Barany, “Democratic Consolidation and the Military: The East European Experience.” Comparative Politics (1997): 28.
26. Ibid, Barany, 1997: 24.
27. Central Intelligence Agency. Director of Central Intelligence SUBJECT: NIE 11/12-83, Military Reliability of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact Allies, 1983, 15. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp83m00914r002700060001-0.
28. Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 1998), 551.
29. Michael Edward Duffy, “The Polish Armed Forces: Warsaw Pact Reliability in Question” (Dissertation, Monterey, California, Naval Postgraduate School, 1983).
30. Ibid, Central Intelligence Agency, 16.
31. Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms 1985-1990 (Hertfordshire, UK: Philip Allan, 1990).
32. Wilfried Loth, “Moscow, Prague and Warsaw: Overcoming the Brezhnev Doctrine,” Cold War History 1, no. 2 (2001): 103–18.
33. Kara-Murza, Telegin, Alexander Aleksandrov, and Mikhail Murashkin, [Na poroge orangevoi revolyutsii] На пороге «оранжевой» революции. (2005), http://bookap.info/psywar/orangrev.
34. Sydney Tarrow, Power in Movement, Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Third Edition. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 159.
35. Mark Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
36. Ibid, Karklins and Petersen.
37. Michael Urban, Lecture, Russian Politics (Santa Cruz, California: University of California Santa Cruz, Department of Politics, 2011).
38. Todd Landman, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics, 3rd ed. (London, UK: Routledge, 2008), 72.
39. Defection is an occurrence of insubordination on the part of senior or junior military members that can arise at any point from when oppositional protest emerges and actively pursues revolutionary goals (regime transition). Insubordination can take form as direct defiance of orders, or through indirect defiance such as not doing ones job to protect a political status quo.
40. Ibid, Brooks, 2019.
41. Paul Lorenzo Johnson, “Virtuous Shirking: Social identity, Military Recruitment, and Unwillingness to Repress” (PhD Dissertation, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, 2017).
42. Military commanders/leadership considered their uniformed troops to be highly reliable under Communist governance due to the grave consequences political dissidents faced in these regimes.
43. Local governors’ political decision making capability was severely limited under Communist, one-party state governance structures. These actors are included into this framework for empirical clarity. When dissent/resistance first arises, it is not always very large and threatening in character.
44. Across the cases under attention, on one hand, cases in which defection did not occur saw regime leaders engage in self-initiated processes of reform that did not require them to fall back on their security agents to repress. On the other hand, where regime leaders did weigh their options while facing uncertainty of how their security forces would respond, they ended up choosing to order to repress rather than concede (e.g. Romania).
45. In the cases under attention in this study, all featured ethnically similar military forces and populations, including the Czechoslovak case which even though is the only country that had a degree of heterogeneity in its armed forces (relative to population) – as noted earlier, mass dissent was concentrated in Prague, a capital city that at the time was homogeneous with ethnic Czechs.
46. Ibid, Brooks, 2019.
47. Eva Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics 44, no. 2 (2012): 127–49.
48. Ibid, Goldman, 186.
49. Ibid, Goldman.
50. Zoltan Barany, “East European Armies in the Transitions and Beyond,” East European Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1992): 1–30.
51. David Betz Civil-military Relations in Russia and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2004).
52. Ibid, Barany 1992.
53. Jeffrey Simon, Poland and NATO: A Study in Civil-military Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
54. Ibid, Simon, 10.
55. Steven Pfaff and Yang Guobin, “Double-edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989,” Theory and Society, 30, no. 4 (2001): 539–89.
56. John Glenn, “Competing challengers and contested outcomes to state breakdown: the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia,” Social Forces 78, no. 1 (1999): 194.
57. Michael Dobbs, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (London, UK: A&C Black, 2013), 296.
58. This particular case elucidates the dynamics laid out in stage one of the framework of this study as the militia’s actions in not repressing nonviolent dissidents (workers and students) was particularly driven by strategic nonviolent action – boos and jeers which left the militia demoralized and leaderless (see Dobbs 2013, p. 296). It is plausible to assume that the Ministry of Defense made its decisions attuned to similar dynamics.
59. Bernard Wheaton, Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988-1991 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 72.
60. Henry Carey, Romania since 1989: Politics, Economics, and Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington books, 2004), 101.
61. Victor Sebetsyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. (New York City: Pantheon Books, 2009).
62. Lavinia Stan and Diane Vancea, Post-Communist Romania at Twenty-Five: Linking Past, Present, and Future (London, UK: Lexington Books, 2015), 11.
63. Los Angeles Times. Press, 1989, October 18). Honecker Ousted in E. Germany, Ending 18 Years of Iron Rule. Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-10-18/news/mn-415_1_east-germany.
64. Ibid, Dobbs.
65. Ibid, Dobbs. 175–8.
66. David Childs, D. The Fall of the GDR (London: Pearson Education Ltd, 2001), 88.
67. Ibid, Goldman, 89.
68. Guatam Maitra, Tracing the Eagle’s Orbit: Illuminating Insights into Major US Foreign Policies since Independence (Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2007), 164.
69. Zoltan Barany, How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why (New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 2016).
70. Ibid, Bellin, 2012.
71. Ibid, Barany, 2016, 141.